Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Went for a walk at Kranji Turuk Track with several friends. It was mostly a marsh area, especially that it had been raining for the past few days. As such, I wore booties throughout the entire trip.

Since it's a marsh area, I wasn't surprise to see lots of Lotus Plants (Nelumbo nucifera). The flowers reminded of the Chinese saying, "出污泥而不染", which refers to the lotus flowers emerging untainted by the mud. Sometimes, this is also used to describe someone who grew up in a very bad environment, but yet remains a good person.

Can't use this phrase on JL though, since he was literally "tainted with mud" after he came out of the marsh. Haha.

A Chinese man told us that this particular herb has wonderful medicinal values. Can't quite remember what he had said, but it has such small and delicate flowers, that I couldn't resist taking a few macro shots of it.

Somehow the flowers come in two colours - whitish and yellow.

We later came across this plant with interesting white bumpy fruits. Did a search and found out that this is the Australian Mulberry (Pipturus argenteus), though it is actually not from the mulberry family, Moraceae, but from the nettle family, Urticaceae. This exotic plant is introduced to Singapore fairly recently, possibly in the 1980s. The fruits are sweet and edible, and the fibre from the plant can be used to make fishing lines, nets and even cloth! It is also the host plant for several species of butterflies, and hence are often planted in gardens.

And indeed, we found many caterpillars on the shrub! These are the caterpillars of the Malayan Eggfly (Hypolimnas anomala anomala).

On another shrub, we found several more matured Malayan Eggfly caterpillars.

In the more waterlogged areas, we found lots of Water Bananas (Ludwigia adscendens).

The Polygonum pulchrum has lots of little flowers.

Just before we left, we saw a little tractor millipede.

And fortunately we left ahead of schedule, as it started pouring while we were on our way out the mini van!